Keeping Your Personal Contacts Private In A Company Setting

Who is on YOUR contact list…?Think for a moment: whose names and phone numbers appear in your mobile phonebook or your Google Contacts? Just friends? Just family? Just business contacts? Do you keep your personal and business contacts separate? Unlikely! The vast majority of us include personal and business contacts in the SAME lists. After all, we’re using our various phones to make business and personal calls every day. We’re calling the printer about the company brochure. We’re following up with a sales lead. And then, in between calls, we’re making dinner plans with friends. It doesn’t make us bad employees. It’s just easier and more efficient to keep our personal and business contacts together in a single, convenient location. Yet here’s a question for you: Would you ever want to SHARE your personal contacts’ names and phone numbers with your work colleagues? Probably not. I know that I certainly wouldn’t! And the vast majority of people in a corporate setting feel the same way. That’s why, when we were developing Aptus FonB, maintaining the privacy of personal contacts (and even some business contacts) was deemed a critical, must-have feature. Nobody wants to share their private contact lists. Your CEO… managers… sales reps… customer service staff… right down to that intern you just hired to make coffee and fetch dry cleaning… all value the security and privacy of their personal contact lists. Why? There are more reasons than you might think:

CEOs and top-level executives frequently have the names of high-profile clients, partners, and colleagues in their contact lists – phone numbers that have been shared with an assumption of absolute discretion. These names and numbers can’t be leaked or it risks a reputation… a relationship… and likely revenue.

The #1 asset for most sales representatives is their ‘lead’ list -- especially for those whose salary is partially or wholly commission-based. They aren’t interested in sharing the names of their top clients or their hottest leads with fellow sales reps.

Most of us have the names of ‘exes’ in our contact lists. Ex-employers. Ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends). Ex-friends. We don’t want these past relationships to be readily available for review by managers and fellow employees.

Our private life, outside of work, should be exactly that – PRIVATE! We all want the option of keeping the details of our personal lives to ourselves. While some people enjoy sharing their entire lives via social media, others prefer to be more discrete.

As you can see, there are many reasons why individual members of an organization might want to keep certain names in their contact lists PRIVATE. And I believe that, as developers, we have a responsibility to consider the bigger picture and protect the privacy, relationships, and income of our employers and colleagues…(Even if they can’t see the potential risks!) ... That’s why we insisted on building Aptus FonB to include a series of simple, flexible yet secure privacy features. I’m talking about privacy features that should make the vast majority of owners, managers, and employees comfortable using Aptus FonB to work from a unified, companywide phonebook, while still allowing managers to oversee the productivity of their sales teams, customer service representatives, and more. With Aptus FonB, you have the option to:

Securely import your Google Contacts (with the power to ‘revoke access’ to your Google Contacts from within Google OR FonB at any time).

Securely import your mobile (iPhone) phonebook contacts.

Mark every contact in your contact list as ‘Private’ or ‘Corporate.’

‘Corporate’ contacts become available to everyone on the unified company FonB directory.

‘Private’ contacts are only visible to you.

Keep ‘Personal’ calls private. Names and phone numbers will never be associated. So managers and administrators can see that you made a ‘Personal’ call, and what time the call was made – but they won’t know who you were calling.

‘Corporate’ call details become available for review by managers and fellow team members via the FonB user interface.

Managers can now be aware of how many Private Calls being carried out - explaining the measure of personal vs work related calls.

As you can see, these privacy features encourage all levels of employees to use Aptus FonB to more efficiently manage their corporate communication via this unified phonebook…… By keeping personal calls and contacts PRIVATE.And developers and system administrators can sleep soundly at night, knowing that your employer isn’t going to suddenly call, raging that his personal contact list has been shared with dire consequences.Learn more about Aptus FonB And take note, FREE 30-Day Trial